The Whole Truth
by Nyiestra
Summary: Tag to 1.22 Blue Templar.  Jamie tells Danny the rest of the reason he kept his family out of the loop.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** The Whole Truth

**Summary:** Tag to Blue Templar. Jamie tells Danny the rest of the reason he kept his family out of the loop.

**A/N:** Maybe it's me, but Jamie seemed a bit suspicious of his older brother, so I didn't buy that he kept his mouth shut about the Templar investigation solely because he wanted to carry on what his brother left unfinished.

**A/N 2: **I originally intended there to be more of this, but I think it ended okay.

**Disclaimer:** As much as I would love to own Danny Reagan (and the rest of them), I don't. All in fun; no money made.

"Hey, Danny?" Danny raised his eyes from the sports page to see his brother standing in the doorway, looking down at his hands. "You got a minute?"

This looked like the type of conversation that was going to require his full attention, judging by the way Jamie shuffled his feet as he came into the room. He didn't do that very often anymore; his little brother was growing into the uniform. Danny folded the paper carefully and set it aside, shrugging. "Sure."

Jamie sat down opposite him, still looking at his hands. Danny waited him out; contrary to popular belief around here, he could be patient, when the situation called for it.

His younger brother looked up so suddenly Danny thought he might have given himself whiplash. "I lied to you and dad—when he asked me why I didn't say anything about the Templar?"

Jamie's body language had screamed confession, but Danny hadn't been able to figure what his straight-laced brother might have done that warranted a case of nerves like this. He hadn't even been this shaken up when he'd admitted to their father that he'd lied to IA.

"Well, I didn't lie." Jamie's gaze slid down again, but he looked up almost as quickly. "I just—it wasn't the whole reason, you know?" His eyes pleaded with Danny to understand, but Danny wasn't sure what it was that he was supposed to understand.

"Then why?"

"Because, you know—Joe didn't tell you guys, either? You ever wonder why?"

"In the three days since I've known about this?" Danny didn't try as hard as he maybe should have to keep the words from sounding like the rebuke that they were. "Yeah, a few times. But I figure he probably didn't want to put dad in the middle." Joe liked playing the peacemaker; it was one of the many things the family missed with him gone. Danny shrugged. "Why do you think?"

"And I was looking at photos with grandpa, and you had the pin, and you wouldn't talk about it, and Joe never told you? I didn't know what to think."

Danny's stomach twisted as Jamie's words sank in, very slowly. But even when he pieced it all together, he didn't quite believe what he'd heard. "What are you saying?"

"I don't even know if I know you anymore, Danny. Some days, I feel like maybe I never did." Jamie's eyes carried an apology that hadn't crossed his lips yet. "I didn't know what to think."

"You didn't know what to think, and your mind automatically went to maybe I'm covering for the guys who killed my brother?" Danny shoved his chair back as he stood, so violently that it would have toppled over if he hadn't caught it just in time. Jamie drew back, his expression guarded like he thought Danny might take a swing at him.

It was tempting.

"What did I ever do to make you think for a second I'd ever—"

"I tried to ask you, Danny." Jamie got to his feet more slowly, even as his voice rose in frustration. "Would it've killed you to tell me then what you said three days ago, about the strip clubs and the drinks? But you blew me off. What was I supposed to think?"

"Maybe that I'd die for anybody in this family, any day of the week?" Danny turned away, scrubbing his hand over his face. Angry as he was to hear his youngest brother voice that kind of doubt—the very thought of it made him physically ill—he couldn't ignore the feeling niggling at the back of his mind that somewhere along the line he'd screwed up, done something, somehow, to erode any sort of trust between them. "Jesus, Jamie."

"I'm—I'm sorry, Danny. I know it was stupid, and I should never've doubted you like that. But with how you acted, and knowing Joe kept it a secret from all of you—I guess I got paranoid. I'm sorry."

Danny wanted to walk away; apology or no, he didn't want to look at Jamie right then, but he had to turn back—he had to know. "So why you telling me now?"

"Because I figured you had a right to know. I kept enough secrets, and I felt guilty enough doing that."

"You feel guilty now?"

Jamie held his gaze, unblinking. "Yeah, I do."

Danny tossed the reply over his shoulder on his way out. "Good."


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Okay, so I was all set to leave it at part 1, but then this bit occurred to me, and I just had to write it. It was making me crazy. I make no promises when, or if, there will be more.

**-2-**

_Two months later_

Jamie hung the damp dish towel over the handle to the oven door and slipped out of the kitchen while Erin and Linda were deep in conversation over the pan from the pot roast. He found Danny alone in the living room, the television on low, flipping aimlessly through the stations. He hung in the doorway for a moment or two, and almost walked away when Danny started cycling back through a second time.

Maybe this wasn't a good time. Not that any time was a good time for him to talk to Danny, lately. Ever since the Templar, his older brother had avoided him like the plague. It was what had prompted him to go looking for a reason, to understand why Joe had felt the need to keep his work on the Templar investigation from his family.

He'd found his answers—and now wished fervently that he'd never gone looking in the first place.

"I know you're there, kid. Eyes're burning a hole in the back of my head." But he didn't turn around—or stop flipping through the channels.

Now or never; if he didn't just force the words out, he'd never say them. "You know I asked you if you knew why Joe kept the Templar investigation a secret from you and dad?"

He didn't need to see Danny's reflection in the television screen to know he'd rolled his eyes. The sigh he heaved was enough. "This again?"

"I went looking, Danny. The FBI knew you'd been a Templar—"

"And you wanted to see if they had anything on me?" Danny interrupted. "Of course you did."

Jamie scowled, despite the fact that Danny couldn't see him. "It was driving me crazy, Danny, not knowing what was going through his head. And I found out." He bit his lip, bracing himself for the backlash and honestly a little afraid of how his brother might react. "You lied to me… you lied to dad. Joe was investigating you, Danny. You didn't get out of the Templar until after Joe died."

The television screen suddenly went black; Danny went unnaturally still. "Does dad know?" His brother's voice was soft, controlled, and without a view of Danny's face, Jamie couldn't tell if he was furious—or afraid.

"No."

He'd thought about it, thought hard, as he went through Joe's reports to the Bureau and the things of his they'd all boxed up and put into storage. He'd found notes on the investigation, tucked away behind Joe's tax returns. They'd been easily missed by whoever packed them away, but Jamie knew what he was looking for.

He had a lot of questions; there were a lot of things he didn't understand. But he'd come to one conclusion: no matter what Danny had been involved in, no matter what dirt Joe might have had on him, he wouldn't have covered up their brother's murder. Jamie still owed him a debt for ever entertaining that thought.

"I didn't know they killed Joe." Now Jamie recognized the tone in his brother's voice. He'd heard less pain there after Danny had been shot. "I knew Malvesky didn't like him. But I didn't know he'd warned him off." Danny snorted. "Some detective."

Finally, his brother stood. He shoved his hands in his pockets and crossed to stare out the window, keeping his back to Jamie. "I wondered what the hell Joe was doing with us. I joined up thinking it was… what it used to be, you know? Figured he did the same thing. I thought he'd get out when he figured what we were really about. I couldn't figure why he stuck around, but I never thought for a second he was working with the Feds. Or that Malvesky would go after him."

"I know." Jamie glanced back down the hall. They were still safe; he could hear his dad horsing around with his nephews. They'd keep him busy for a while. He moved to stand next to Danny, watching his brother's face in the glass.

"I don't get it, Danny. Thing like the Templar—what did it do for you? Because …" Jamie swallowed hard, knowing that he couldn't take these words back once he said them, and they had the potential to permanently damage his relationship with his older brother. "Because you're a bad cop, who gives a lot of good ones a bad rap. But you're not dirty—not like them, anyway." Joe had stuck to hard facts in his report, glossing over the things he wouldn't be able to prove, but Jamie could read between the lines and the things he was guilty of—his older brother would never have been a part of them.

Danny didn't react at all. Whatever he was thinking didn't show in his face, or his eyes.

"I mean, Malvesky was about the worst kind of scum I've ever seen. I know I haven't seen as much as you have, but I've seen a lot." He cracked a smile, not expecting to see it returned. "I went to law school, after all." He'd put some of his classmates up against the Templars any day of the week.

His brother continued to stare blankly out at the street.

"Why, Danny?"

"What'd Joe have on me?" he asked softly, and it took Jamie a second to figure where Danny was going with this. He wanted to know how much Jamie knew already—whether it was so he could avoid giving up more information, or so he'd know where to start. "Enough for a conviction?"

"Probably," Jamie admitted. Danny featured fairly prominently in Joe's reports to the FBI, and even more in the notes he'd kept for himself. Little of it was individually all that damaging—nothing Jamie hadn't known went on well before he put on the uniform himself—but combined, it was pretty damning stuff. "Drug deals that you knew about, evidence tampering. A couple times the money or drugs that made it into evidence might have been a little light." He mimicked Danny's posture, hands in his pockets, and stared down at his shoes.

"What else?"

"That Malvesky backed your story when you almost killed a suspect." He'd been able to feel Joe's disgust, reading his notes on that incident. Danny had beaten the man within an inch of his life, according to Joe, but the official report had claimed the suspect, believed to have murdered his own wife and child, had fallen down the stairs trying to evade police. With Malvesky's word, no one had looked too closely at the holes in Danny's story, no matter what the suspect—or victim—had to say.

"You look at a guy who can't pick up his little girl because of a cop killer bullet he took to his shoulder, and then see him take a couple hundred bucks out of fifty grand on a drug bust, and it doesn't look so bad." Danny's eyes met his in the window. "The guy I almost killed? Son of a bitch beat his five-year-old son in the head with a shovel—and that was just the last time. I'm not gonna apologize for what I did. And I figure I've done a lot more good working Major Case than I would've in motor pool, or something, where I woulda ended up if Sonny hadn't backed me up. If they woulda let me keep my badge at all."

Violence like that—Jamie had seen pictures—would have cost him his badge. It might even have cost him jail time.

"That's why the Templar. Malvesky and the rest of them, they took it too far, and I'm not gonna say Joe was wrong, trying to bring us down. But somebody's gotta have our backs, because the DA's office? The mayor's office? They don't give a shit. DA wants convictions, and the mayor wants his budget balanced. And they expect us to deliver with our hands tied behind our backs."

Danny turned away from the window, facing Jamie fully for the first time. "You want to tell Dad? Blow the whistle on me, arrest me? Go ahead. Because if I'd been paying more attention, I probably could have saved Joe's life, and instead he probably died thinking I might as well have been the one pulling the trigger. And I got to live with that—and nothing you, or dad, or the DA's office can do could be worse than that."


End file.
